Chapter 33: The Embodiment of Language

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Okay, let's unpack this.

We are embarking on a deep dive into a revolutionary intellectual shift.

That, really, it challenges the very foundation of how we define human thought.

It really does.

This shift asserts that every sentence you utter, every concept you grasp, and even the deepest reaches of your abstract reasoning are profoundly shaped by one thing,

your physical body.

That's right.

Our source material today is Mark Johnson's pivotal chapter, The Embodiment of Language, which you can find in the Oxford Handbook of Four -E Cognition.

And our mission, really, is to take you through the argument that language is not some disembodied abstract system of logic floating above reality, but is instead fundamentally rooted in our bodily experiences, our brains, and our constant interaction with the world.

And this focus on embodiment, it's not just a theoretical position, is it?

It is the cornerstone of the larger four -e cognition framework.

This whole idea that thinking is embodied, embedded, inactive,

and extended.

Absolutely.

But to truly appreciate this modern revolution, I think we have to grasp the dramatic historical tension that came before it.

We absolutely do.

Because for centuries, and specifically for most of the 20th century in the Anglo -American philosophical tradition,

the body was considered, well, it was considered irrelevant noise.

Just static.

Just static.

Mainstream of philosophy, particularly analytic philosophy of language,

minimized or outright denied the body's role in syntax and semantics and pragmatics.

They were looking for universal objective truth and the messy subjective finite body.

It just seemed like the enemy of that goal.

And it's fascinating because you had thinkers like the phenomenologists Merle Loponte and American pragmatists like William James and John Dewey.

I mean, they were arguing for the centrality of lived experience and the body decades earlier.

Oh, yeah.

But they were largely sidelined, weren't they, by this dominant logical tradition?

Completely.

And it really wasn't until the last three decades, with this explosion of data from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience,

that the body and brain's role became, frankly, undeniable.

So the science caught up.

The science caught up.

We now have detailed scientific explanations of how our physical makeup, our sensory capacities and our brain architecture are not just passive containers for language, but are the profound shapers of thought and communication itself.

It's a journey from pure abstract logic to the visceral reality of being a functioning organism.

So let's start at the beginning of that intellectual framework, the one that the embodiment movement really sought to overturn.

We need to understand the philosophical orientation that led to this neglect of the body.

And that means we have to go back to the foundational work of Gottlob Frege in 1892.

Frege.

His analysis of linguistic expression basically established the ground rules for analytic philosophy.

And in doing so, he explicitly excluded the body from objective meaning.

How did he do that?

Well, when he analyzed any linguistic sign or word, a phrase, he made a crucial set of distinctions to define its content.

He defined four components for every linguistic expression.

And I think the separation he made between the third and fourth components is utterly essential for understanding the next hundred years of philosophy.

So let's let's carefully delineate these four elements.

Okay, right.

First, you have the sign itself.

That's just the word or the expression printed or spoken.

It's a bluff.

Second, the reference or bedupung in his German, which is the object or the affairs the word points to in the external reality.

So, for example, the reference of the name Barack Obama is the specific individual.

And then we get to the conceptual level.

The third component is the sense or sin.

Now, this is the public share objective understanding or the mode of presentation of the reference.

It's the cognitive content that is grasped universally by anyone who speaks the language.

So not my personal feeling about it at all.

The classic example is the morning star and the evening star.

They have a different sense, a different way of being presented, even though they share the same reference, which is the planet Venus.

The sense is what allows us to share knowledge.

Okay.

And the fourth element is the crucial casualty in this whole debate over embodiment.

This is where Frege really draws a line in the sand regarding the body.

This is it.

This is the associated ideas or vorstellung.

These are the subjective,

internal, private images, ideas, or feelings that a sign might call up in an individual's mind.

My personal stuff.

Your personal stuff.

Frege was crystal clear on this.

Associated ideas arise from memories of sense impressions, past emotional episodes, specific acts you have performed.

In short, they are tied to your body, your personal, unique, and subjective experience.

The philosophical implication here is just staggering, isn't it?

Sense is defined as the common property of many, meaning it has to be universal and shareable.

It absolutely cannot depend on the peculiarities of a single body or a specific individual's experience.

It cannot.

He explicitly says that if objective communication is to be possible, we must have no scruples in speaking simply of the sense because it's universal.

But for an idea, he insisted, we must always specify to whom it belongs and at what time.

Give us an example.

Sure.

Let's take the word mother.

The objective sense is the abstract, universal set of roles and relations common to all human groups.

But your specific associated ideas, you know, the image of your own mother, the smell of her cooking, the feeling of her touch, these are private.

They're body dependent.

And for Frege, they're completely irrelevant to the objective linguistic meaning we're trying to analyze.

So the body and its unique experiences are just relegated to the realm of subjective noise.

Exactly.

They're deemed cognitively irrelevant to the core task of philosophy, which he saw as analyzing objective knowledge and truth.

And this framework immediately led to two massive consequences.

First, Frege argued that the basic unit of meaning wasn't the word, but the complete proposition, the sentence.

Why?

Because only a full proposition could possess a truth value, true or false.

If you're concerned with objective knowledge, you have to focus on the unit that conveys that objective truth.

A single word can't be true or false.

OK, that makes sense.

And the second consequence.

And second, to guarantee the sheer existence of these objective, universal senses and propositions, he proposed that really extraordinary metaphysical framework, the three realm ontology.

Right.

This was his attempt to provide a robust housing for objective truth.

It was.

So realm one was the physical, which included bodily events and external objects.

Realm two was the mental encompassing psychological processes and our

subjective experiences are associated ideas.

And then there was this third unnamed realm, the conceptual filing cabinet.

That's a perfect way to put it.

It contained these abstract quasi entities, the objective senses, concepts, propositions, numbers and the truth values themselves, the true and the false.

This was a space separate from the world we perceive and the minds we inhabit.

But wait, if this third realm is independent of our minds and bodies, how do we even access it?

Frouge's answer was that we grasp them.

We don't create them and they don't depend on our individual psychological states.

Since bodily and mental events were judged incapable of providing objective, shareable meaning, which was the central goal.

This third realm was essential.

So the consequence for language theory was that you could ignore embodiment.

You have to ignore it because the real meaning, the sense lives in a non -physical, non -mental objective space.

That is the ideological bedrock of the disembodied tradition.

And this view that meaning is linguistic, sentential, propositional and objective was inherited by virtually all the major figures in the analytic tradition from Russell to Austin to Quine and Davidson.

And this led to what we now define as a disembodied account,

a theory that assumes syntax, semantics and pragmatics can be explained fully without detailing how grammatical forms and meaning are shaped by the body, the brain and the physical environment.

So the philosophical tendency was always to start with concepts already formed.

Already grasped from that third realm, yes.

And then you analyze their logical relations and propositions.

The critical first step, the bodily origins of those concepts was just completely overlooked.

And this philosophical view in turn merged seamlessly with first generation cognitive science, which arose in the mid 20th century.

We're talking about generative linguistics, information processing psychology and early AI research.

All of which focused on the mind as a formal rule -based computational engine.

Language was seen as a set of rules operating on abstract symbols, divorced from the messy biological reality of having a physical body and interacting with an environment.

The initial cognitive science was inherently disembodied, committed to this idea that thought and language were implemented in the hardware, the body, but not shaped by it.

So if this rigid philosophical castle was built on abstract logic, where did the first crack start to show?

This is where the story gets really interesting.

The second generation shift starting around the mid 1970s.

Well, the cracks emerged because the empirical data simply did not support the disembodied view.

A new consensus began to coalesce across multiple disciplines, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, recognizing the essential importance of the body.

And this gave birth to embodied cognitive science.

The core insight being that our bodies are not just irrelevant hardware.

No, the core insight is that the body imposes the very conditions of our experience, thinking and communication.

It's the filter and the structuring mechanism for everything we experience.

If we want to understand meaning, we have to start there.

Okay.

So if meaning doesn't start in Frege's abstract third realm, where does it begin?

It starts with the most fundamental act.

Meaning arises from organism environment interactions.

I mean, meaning begins with the activity of a bounded embodied organism engaging its environment simply to maintain the basic conditions for life and growth.

The nature of the organism dictates the possibilities for meaning.

This brings us to a foundational concept introduced by J .J.

Gibson back in 1979, which completely anchors meaning in the physical world.

Affordances.

Right.

Affordances.

They are not properties of the environment alone, nor are they properties of the organism alone.

They are patterns for meaningful perception and action that are available to an organism relative to its specific physical nature, its needs, and its purpose of activity.

They define the functional reality of the environment for that organism.

So the environment is rich with possibilities, but only those possibilities that our bodies can process or engage with are meaningful to us.

Exactly.

Take the classic example of the cave.

For a human being, a small enclosed cave entrance affords containment, shelter, habitation.

The physical structure of the cave means protection relative to our size, our posture, our need for warmth.

But for an elephant.

But for an elephant, that same small opening does not afford access.

Therefore, the physical structure carries a completely different attenuated meaning, or no meaning at all, for the elephant compared to the human.

I see.

Meaning, then, is not an abstract label we just affix to a neutral object, but rather it's a set of potential experiences enacted or suggested by the body's interaction with that object.

This is why the embodied definition of meaning is so expansive.

It's far broader than the conceptual propositional meaning that analytic philosophers focused on.

Embodied meaning encompasses any experiences enacted or suggested by affordances, whether they are past, present, or projected future possibilities.

And the consequences of accepting this broad embodied definition of meaning are revolutionary for two reasons, right?

Yes.

First, it acknowledges evolutionary continuity.

If meaning is grounded in interaction, then non -human animals, even those lacking our capacity for abstraction, are clearly capable of attenuated meaning -making relative to their embodied interactions.

It connects us back to the rest of the biological world.

And second, it finally embraces the full range of human meaning -making that the Phrygian tradition just had to ignore.

Oh, absolutely.

Think about painting, music, sculpture, architecture, dance, gesture, ritual practices.

These are profound, often non -linguistic forms of meaning that simply cannot be captured by science systems relying only on conceptual or propositional content.

They are fundamentally body -based.

Meaning is an inherent part of the continuous process of interaction, not something separate that we attach to an experience after the fact.

Okay, let's move to a specific mechanism that really demonstrates how our basic anatomy structures our language.

Body part projections.

We use our own bodies as a template for understanding space.

We do this constantly and unconsciously.

We experience our bodies as having fronts and backs, tops and bottoms, sides.

We then naturally project these orientations onto inanimate objects, which biologically have no inherent front or back things like houses, refrigerators, rocks, television screens.

And even dynamic objects follow this rule.

The front of a car is defined by its canonical direction of motion.

And if the driver reverses, we say the car backs up, borrowing the linguistic concept of our own backwards movement.

And the spatial relations, like in front of, are defined relative to the viewer's body orientation or the object's projected orientation.

The source material offers a fantastic cross -linguistic example that shows the principle of embodiment is universal, even if the application is relative.

Tell us about the house example, because this really challenges the idea that English is some universal standard for spatial thought.

It does.

In English, if a dog stands between me and a tree, I say the dog is in front of the tree.

I'm projecting a front onto the tree that faces me.

So the tree is treated as if it were oriented toward me.

However, in Hausa, the projection is often reversed.

The front of the tree is projected as facing away from the viewer.

So you're telling me the same dog would be described as being?

Well, as being behind or in back of the tree relative to the tree's projected orientation.

The language uses the same basic building blocks, body parts and orientation, but it implements the geometric projection differently.

This proves that the in front of relation is fundamentally body part or body orientation based, regardless of how specific cultures define which way the front faces.

And this mechanism is then leveraged metaphorically in countless ways.

We talk about the arm of a river, the eye of a needle, the heart of the matter, the head of a company, all extensions of our physical anatomy into the abstract world.

Which leads us to the fundamental building blocks of thought established by the body's interaction with physics, image schematic affordances.

Okay, let's reel down on image schemas.

The chapter describes them as intrinsically meaningful recurring patterns.

How are they formed?

They're established by the characteristic neuronal wiring of our perceptual and motor systems through continuous ongoing interaction with consistent environmental energy patterns.

They are the scaffolding for complex concepts, operating below the level of conscious conceptualization.

Give us the clearest examples of environmental constants generating these schemas.

Well, the most obvious one is gravity.

The constant experience of Earth's gravitational field generates the up -down schema or verticality.

This schema structures everything from basic object location on top of or below the motion like rising and falling.

Crucially, the up -down axis is one of the most fundamental in human experience, constantly enforced by physics.

And the balance schema must be equally fundamental, given that we spend most of our waking lives trying to maintain it.

Precisely.

Repeated experiences of physical balance and the loss of balance generate a schema that applies literally to objects, a balanced scale, and is immediately mapped metaphorically to abstract domains.

Political fairness, mathematical equations needing to be in balance, or the concept of justice.

Let's elaborate on the container schema, because that's another big one.

We physically experience containment every time we enter a room, put food in a bowl, or wear clothes.

Yes, the container schema involves a boundary, an interior, and an exterior.

Since we are constantly encountering boundaries and enclosures, this pattern is neuraly solidified.

And we'd immediately map this physical containment onto abstract concepts.

We say, the economy is in a slump, we talk about people getting out of depression, or an idea being full of holes, or a feeling being deep within us.

The logic of physical containment structures are understanding of emotional and conceptual states.

That dramatically illustrates the power of these non -propositional structures.

And the chapter emphasizes that image schemas are typically multimodal.

And that's a key detail that disembodied theories often miss.

Schemas are not tied to one sensory input.

We experience the containment schema through sight, seeing a box, touch, feeling the sides of the box, and proprioception, feeling our body inside a room.

The schemas are resilient foundational patterns because they cross sensory boundaries, reflecting the integrated structure of our interaction with the environment, not just specific sensory data points.

So we've established that the body structures are spatial understanding and provides the basic building blocks of thought.

Now let's jump right into the neuroscientific argument for how we process concepts themselves.

This is where modern embodied theory, I think, truly proves its case.

This is the argument for the continuity between perception and conception.

And it echoes William James's early thoughts from way back in 1911.

Lawrence Barcellou has formalized this idea that concepts for concrete objects like a hammer or a house are fully grounded in the sensory and motor experiences afforded by those objects.

So the central claim is powerful.

There are not two independent systems, one for perception and one for abstract conception.

Exactly.

Wait, so if I'm not accessing some abstract definition when I think of a chair, what am I doing?

You are engaging in a simulation process.

To conceive of an object is to selectively activate the same sensory, motor, and effective neural processes you would use if you were actually interacting with that object.

The concept chair is understood by running a simulation.

Tell us what that simulation looks like in terms of mogalities.

It's highly multimodal.

It involves activating the neural areas responsible for vision, seeing different shapes, materials, angles, touch, feeling the texture of the seat, audition, the sound of the chair scraping the floor, and proprioception, running the motor programs required for sitting down, standing up, or pushing it.

Understanding chair is running a summary version of those possible experiences.

Okay, but this sounds suspiciously like Frege's Associated Ideas, which he tossed out as irrelevant subjective residue.

How is Barcellou's simulation fundamentally different?

That is the crucial distinction.

Frege's Associated Ideas were private, subjective, idiosyncratic, just noise unique to one person's mind.

Barcellou's simulations, however, are neurally grounded and predictable.

They utilize shared fixed neurological hardware or sensor motor system in response to the word.

While the exact simulation might vary slightly from person to person, the functional structure of the simulation, the activation of visual, motor, and tactile areas relevant to the object, is a shared mechanism of understanding.

It's a shared process of enactment, not a subjective image floating in some separate mental realm.

That makes the difference clear.

It's the physical shared mechanism that guarantees the meaning, not an abstract entity.

And Barcellou detailed this in 1999 as the six dimensions of perceptual symbols.

Yes.

He outlined the neural model of conceptual understanding.

So first, these are neural representations located in the actual sensory motor areas of the brain.

Second, they represent schematic components.

Not the full holistic experience, but abstract features like redness or verticality.

Okay.

And third, they are multimodal, integrating across vision, touch, proprioception, and even introspection.

Fourth, these related perceptual symbols are integrated into a simulator, which is a brain mechanism capable of producing limitless selective simulations of component features.

Fifth, you have frames that organize these symbols within the simulator.

They impose structure on the relations between components.

And finally, the word itself, the linguistic sign, provides the control.

Yes, the word acts as a pointer, linguistically controlling the construction of the specific simulation you run.

If I say, lift the heavy cup, the words lift and heavy constrain the motor simulation in your brain to exclude light, trivial movements.

The language dictates the simulation parameters.

The chapter also notes the philosophical nuance that Barcellou's view can be made with a non -representational theory of mind.

Explain what that means in plain language.

Right.

So it means we don't necessarily have to assume there is a separate representation mediating between the word and the understanding.

We can simply say that grasping a concept is the running of the neural simulation.

The activation of those sensory, motor, and affective areas is the meaning itself enacted in that specific context.

Understanding is doing, neurally speaking.

And this leads us directly to the hard neuroscientific evidence, right?

Vittorio Gallese and his colleagues showing that when we hear language referring to the body in action, we activate the neural resources normally used to perform that action.

This is the crucial finding that validates embodied semantics.

When you listen to or read a linguistic description of an action, say, the woman grabbed the bottle, it triggers a motor simulation.

This simulation activates the same cortical motor regions, including those with mirror properties, that would be active if you were physically performing the act of grabbing.

So the semantic content of the word grab is partially housed, physically,

in the part of your brain that controls your grasping hand motions.

That is a profound physical grounding of meaning.

It is, and this insight was formalized into a general theory of language understanding by Ben Bergen, the simulation semantics hypothesis.

He proposes that we understand language by simulating in our minds what it would be like to experience the things that the language describes.

What's some of the most compelling evidence that supports this general simulation theory?

The neuroimaging evidence concerning verb aspect is very strong.

Research consistently shows that the motor system is significantly more likely to be activated when understanding language about an action in the progressive aspect, meaning the action is ongoing.

For example, the baker is kneading the dough.

But if the action is completed, that activation drops off.

Exactly.

If the sentence is in the perfect aspect, a completed action, like the baker has kneaded the dough, the activation in the motor cortex diminishes.

The mental simulation tracks the temporal reality of the action, shutting down the motor preparation once the action is conceptually finished.

The source material also highlights interference tests, which is a great way to prove that the simulation is necessary for comprehension, not just some side effect.

Correct.

Researchers have interfered with the perceptual system while subjects are trying to understand action sentences.

For example, they might show people lines or spirals moving in a specific direction while they read a sentence describing motion.

And the interference.

The interference, the mismatch or overload in the perceptual system significantly increases the time it takes subjects to determine if an action sentence makes sense.

So the brain is actively using those sensorimotor systems to run the simulation.

And if you interrupt the simulation, comprehension slows down.

That's the takeaway.

The hypothesis is highly testable and robust, confirming that language understanding is not just symbolic manipulation.

It's an ongoing temporal process that recruits our full sensory, motor and effective apparatus.

We understand by reliving.

Now we address the elephant in the room.

This has always been the single biggest sticking point for disembodied theorists.

Simulation semantics works beautifully for a concrete object like a chair or a basic verb like grab.

But what about abstract concepts?

How can the body possibly explain concepts like mind, freedom, love, knowledge or justice?

That is the greatest challenge and the revolutionary answer comes from conceptual metaphor theory, CMT, developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson starting back in 1980.

They demonstrated that body -based metaphor is not some fringe linguistic flourish.

It is our principal and indispensable means of abstract conceptualization and reasoning.

So abstract thought is not defined by some purely non -focal logic.

Instead, it's structured by multiple metaphors that consistently map entities, structures and relations from a physical or social source domain to more abstract target domain.

Exactly.

Take a very common abstract concept, understanding.

How do we talk about it?

We use the physical act of seeing as the source domain.

We say, I see what you mean.

That concept is perfectly clear.

Could you shed more light on that difficult idea?

And if a concept is confusing, it's obscure or fuzzy.

Right.

The entire conceptual structure for thought is built on the physical experience of vision and you see this pervasive pattern across nearly every domain.

Think about organization.

Organization is metaphorically conceived as physical structure.

So we talk about concepts being the foundation of an argument or a theory falling apart.

Or needing to build a curriculum

or consider causation.

Causes are metaphorically forces.

We talk about a circumstance forcing our hand or how we were pushed toward a decision.

All these abstract expressions are rooted in our experience of interacting with physical forces.

And over the last few decades, CMT has been confirmed by staggering volumes of cross -linguistic studies, proving its universality.

But the source material stresses that the second and most crucial claim of CMT is about the origin of these metaphors.

It's not based on arbitrary similarity, is it?

No, that's the outdated view.

The vast majority of these conceptual metaphors are not based on conscious literal similarities.

They emerge from common experiential correlations.

We routinely experience the co -occurrence of two different domains in our daily lives.

And this leads to the idea of primary metaphors.

Yes, primary metaphors, as detailed by Grady, arise unconsciously from the neural co -activations of the source and target domains because of the specific bodies we have and the environments we inhabit.

When two experiences consistently occur together, the neural circuitry for both domains fires together, and eventually the one domain, the physical one, can be used to structure the other, the abstract one.

Give us a detailed example of this essential experiential correlation.

Let's take more is UP.

Perfect.

Every time you add liquid to a glass, the level goes up.

Every time you add items to a pile, the pile gets higher.

We constantly experience the correlation between quantity, the abstract domain more,

and verticality, the physical domain UP.

This repeated co -occurrence establishes a fixed neural mapping.

And that's why we say prices are rising, stock levels fell, or my income went up.

Precisely.

The abstract concept of quantity is structured by the physical reality of verticality.

And another potent example is affection is warmth.

Oh, that's a good one.

We experience this correlation because we are often physically warm when we feel affection.

Holding a baby, cuddling a partner, being greeted by a friend often involves physical proximity and warmth.

This physiological correlation leads to expressions like, she gave him a warm welcome, he has a fiery passion, or she was cold and distant.

Our entire language of emotional intimacy is borrowed from our tactile thermal experience.

And this structure is how we handle abstraction.

The primary metaphors combine to create complex metaphor systems that structure our deepest abstract reasoning.

The quintessential example is life is a journey.

This isn't one simple mapping, it's a massive complex system built from numerous simple primary metaphors all based on physical movement.

Walk us through some of the submappings that build that system.

Okay, so we map actions are motions, our purposes are destinations, difficulties are impediments to motion, responsibilities are burdens that weigh us down during the journey.

The physical reality of navigating space dictates the conceptual structure of navigating a lifespan.

And the power of this system is that it grants us inferential patterns.

We don't just use the words, we use the logic of the source domain to reason about the target domain.

Exactly.

If in the physical source domain we know that hitting an obstacle impedes our forward motion, that inferential pattern is transferred immediately.

We then reason about the abstract target domain, concluding that difficulties in life will temporarily or permanently impact our ability to realize our purpose, our destination.

Even when dealing with concepts as abstract as difficult to your purpose, our reasoning structure is being borrowed directly from our capacity for physical locomotion and force dynamics.

We've established that meaning and concepts are embodied.

But the challenge doesn't stop there.

Traditional disembodied theories, especially generative linguistics championed by Chomsky, argued that syntax grammar itself is a purely formal innate system, separate from meaning and use.

That's right.

Chomsky sought universal deep structures that operated via purely formal relations.

Embodied construction grammar, ECG, directly rebuts this.

The embodied counterargument is that linguistic forms are meaningful precisely because they encode the structures of events, actions, agents, and objects that we experience as embodied creatures interacting in a Newtonian world.

So we aren't learning abstract rules.

We are learning conceptual and linguistic constructions, which are pairings of form with a semantic or discourse function.

And these constructions are products of the same cognitive mechanisms we use for physical processing.

And the research has detailed this massive inventory of cognitive structures that determine how we make sense of a situation and subsequently inform grammar.

This includes everything we've discussed, body prep relations, image schemas, conceptual metaphors, but also structures like Charles Fillmore's semantic frames, Leonard Talmy's force dynamics, and Srini Narayanan's action schemas.

Let's focus on the grammatical coding of actions because that provides such a strong link between our motor capacities and syntax.

Fillmore's semantic frames, for instance, define the typical slots in a prototypical action.

Yes, a prototypical action frame involves specific, neurally plausible components.

The action itself, the actor, the object acted upon, the instrument used, the goal, and the manner in which it was performed.

Every time we encounter a verb, our brain attempts to fill these slots, and grammar provides the structure for those slots.

And Srini Narayanan took this action analysis even further into the neurocomputational realm with his executing schema.

This is a general control structure for actions based entirely on their temporal and physical dimensions.

Narayanan's executing schema is fascinating because it proves the physical grounding of grammar.

It details the steps necessary for goal -directed bodily movement, and these steps turn out to be the scaffolding for verbal construction.

Walk us through a few of those temporal stages of the schema.

Okay, it starts with the preparatory state getting ready to act.

Then, starting the process, followed by the main process, which can be instantaneous, like a punch, or prolonged, like running.

Crucially, the schema includes active control options, reflecting our ability to modulate action, the stop option, the resume option, and the continue reiterate option.

And those control options are what our body uses to manage movement, and those are what we encode in our verb forms.

Precisely.

The grammar reflects the physical capability.

The schema concludes with checking for goal fulfillment, the finishing process, and the final state.

The remarkable thing is that Narayanan was able to implement neurocomputational models based on this schema that could both recognize and carry out those action events using robotics.

So the control structure for human action proved to be the cognitive structure underlying the grammar of action verbs.

Exactly.

The conclusion is inescapable.

Languages are expected to code these dimensions of actions and events because they depend on our shared sensory and motor capacities and brain architecture.

Which brings us to the ambitious attempt to synthesize all this evidence.

The neural theory of language, NTL.

This isn't just a theory.

It's a vast project attempting to model the specific neural mechanisms that give rise to all the conceptual structures we've discussed.

Everything from image schemas to conceptual metaphors.

This requires integrating four massive scientific domains, which speaks to its complexity.

It requires integrating neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, to define the constructions and concepts.

Neural computation to model the functioning pathways and experimental embodied cognition to test how thought impacts behavior.

The goal is to provide a complete picture of how the high level linguistic structures emerge from the low level biological machinery.

And central to NTL is the evolutionary mechanism it proposes for abstract thought.

The exeptation hypothesis.

Before we apply this to language, let's clarify the term itself.

Exeptation is a technical evolutionary term.

It means that a trait or a mechanism that evolved for one purpose is later co -opted or repurposed for a different function.

A classic biological example is feathers.

They likely evolved first for temperature regulation, for insulation, and only much later were they exapted for the function of flight.

So applying that mechanism to the brain, NTL proposes that we didn't evolve entirely new dedicated abstract modules.

We just repurposed the existing machinery.

The exeptation hypothesis states that humans repurposed existing circuitry types in the forebrain.

Specifically, the sensorimotor activations originally evolved for perceiving and manipulating concrete objects.

These circuits are exapted.

They're reused for higher level acts like conceptualization and reasoning, primarily structured through conceptual metaphor.

The idea that our ability to think about time or freedom is essentially a neurological hand -me -down from our ability to move and grasp objects is just stunning.

It completely refutes the disembodied blank -slate view.

Jerome Feldman, a key figure in NTL, emphasizes the profound difficulty of this project, supplying the bridges between the molecular biological neural systems and the computational linguistic constructions.

But the power of ECG is that constructions provide the essential high -level computational description, placing the embodied neural character of thought and language firmly at center stage.

We've covered perception, action, and abstraction, but we cannot end the discussion without bringing in a critical dimension that traditional philosophy and early computational models deliberately excluded emotion.

That's a massive blind spot.

The traditional view heavily influenced by Ogden and Richards in 1923 drew a sharp line between descriptive meaning, cognitive content, and emotive meaning, mere feeling, essentially dismissing emotion as cognitively non -essential.

And James rejected that position way back in 1890, arguing that all thought has a feeling dimension, a felt sense of the fringe of meaning or the direction of one's thinking.

And modern neuroscience completely supports James.

Antonio de Mazio's theory of emotions places them at the center of thought, meaning, and value.

He provides the neurobiological justification for why emotions are central to cognition.

De Mazio talks about emotions as automated neurochemical response patterns, helping the body maintain allostasis.

What exactly is allostasis?

Allostasis is the biological process of achieving dynamic equilibrium.

It's the body's ability to maintain stability through change, adapting to external stresses and internal demands.

Unlike simple homeostasis, which is about staying the same, allostasis requires continuous predictive adjustments.

And emotions are?

Emotions are fundamentally automated neurochemical response patterns, designed to help the body navigate and maintain this dynamic equilibrium in response to the environment.

So if an emotionally competent stimulus, a potential threat or nurture hits us, the body automatically runs an emotional response pattern to recover or achieve equilibrium.

Exactly.

The physiological changes happen automatically.

A spike in heart rate, a shift in hormone levels.

The emotion or feeling only occurs when we become consciously aware of these internal physiological changes in our body state.

And the connection to meaning and reason is that emotions are not irrational noise.

Not at all.

They are our most elementary, fundamental way of taking the measure of a situation.

They instantly tell us how things are going for us.

They provide an immediate primordial assessment of possible harm,

potential nurturance or opportunities for enhancement.

They are our primordial contact with our environment and are essential for determining value and significance.

Which means emotion is not opposed to reason.

It's an integral part of conceptualizing and reasoning, permeating our language and providing essential value assessment.

Jenlin's work on felt sense supports this, showing that much of our understanding is felt before it is ever articulated.

And this emotional dimension allows us to tie everything we've discussed back to the overall framework of 4 -E cognition and expand it.

The traditional view holds four Es.

Recap those four for us quickly.

Sure.

Embodied, meaning emerges from physical interactions.

Embedded, cognition arises from interactions with physical and social environments.

Inactive, we create meaning and thought in an ongoing process.

And extended,

we offload operations onto the environment, like writing or using computers.

But the neural theory of language and the comprehensive nature of Johnson's analysis suggest we need three more Es to make theory complete, bringing us to seven Es of cognition.

That's right.

The first edition is emotional, which we just covered, essential for grasping the meaning and significance of our situation and reflected in simulation theory.

The second is evolutionary.

Exactly.

Since our conceptual systems arise through ongoing organism -environment interactions, there is a deep evolutionary dimension.

The stability of human language is not due to some pre -wired, fixed module installed at birth, but due to the relative evolutionary stability of our shared sensorimotor systems and the environments we inhabit.

Language is a biological adaptation.

And the third, the mechanism that bridges the gap between the physical and the abstract, is exaptative.

The exaptative dimension highlights the naturalistic process of recruitment.

It is the crucial explanation for how higher functions emerge.

Through the recruitment and repurposing of the syntax, semantics and logic of our sensory and motor brain areas for abstract thought.

Our abstract language is physically supported by the neural circuitry of grasping, seeing and moving.

Language is thus the product of all seven of these Es.

And Mark Johnson is explicit in his conclusion.

Embodiment comes first.

Our bodily habitation of the world, our shared anacomical structure, and our consistent physical interaction with gravity, containers and forces.

This is what gives rise to our capacity to create and use language.

The intellectual shift is complete.

We have moved from viewing language as abstract quasi -entities in a third realm, to seeing meaning and thought rooted at the most visceral level in our bodily engagements with the world.

So what does this all mean for you, the learner, the person who speaks and thinks every day?

It means recognizing that the entire foundation of the disembodied tradition freezes separation of objective sense from subjective, body -dependent associated ideas,

is philosophically and scientifically unsustainable.

We have overturned that assumption through a series of demonstrable mechanisms.

The necessity of image schemas for spatial reasoning.

The power of conceptual metaphor theory or CMT to structure abstraction.

The neuroscientific evidence for simulation semantics showing that understanding a word means activating sensoromotor circuits.

And the comprehensive seven Es framework, particularly the exaptation hypothesis, which explains the evolutionary pathway to abstract thought.

Right.

This profound shift requires you to think of meaning not as something you apply to a neutral world, but as something you generate simply by being an organism in a body constantly interacting with and assessing your environment.

And here is a provocative final thought for you to carry forward.

Next time you engage in your most abstract intellectual reasoning, perhaps calculating a complex algebraic equation or debating the concept of justice in society, remember the neural theory of language.

It suggests that those high -level thoughts still activate some of the same neural circuitry you use to reach out and grasp a cup or to maintain physical balance while walking across an uneven surface.

How does recognizing that physical visceral foundation that the logic of justice is built on the logic of balance change the way you value a purely intellectual thought?

It means the intellectual is fundamentally irreducibly physical.

Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into the embodiment of language.

We hope you gained a comprehensive understanding of how your body fundamentally shapes your mind, your concepts and your language.

We'll see you next time.